Hello noble people, Thank you kindly for all your answers....but since I am short of time...I have found an alternative method to get around this... for ($i = 0; $i <= $#ARGV; $i++) { $gname = `grep -w @ARGV$i $server_list`; if ( length($gname) == 0) { print "ERROR: Bad input to the script\n"; } This seems to work for now.